Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Film-Tie-In

CHAPTER 1

WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME

I had always wanted to meet a warlord. So we parked our van on the side of the beige road and walked up to the beige house, past dozens of skinny young soldiers brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles and wearing mismatched khaki outfits and rope belts hiked high on their waists. Several flaunted kohl eyeliner and tucked yellow flowers behind their ears. Others decorated their rifle butts with stickers of flowers and Indian movie starlets. Male ethnic Pashtuns loved flowers and black eyeliner and anything fluorescent or sparkly, maybe to make up for the beige terrain that stretched forever in Afghanistan, maybe to look pretty.

Outside the front door, my translator Farouq and I took off our shoes before walking inside and sitting cross-legged on the red cushions that lined the walls. The decorations spanned that narrow range between unicorn-loving prepubescent girl and utilitarian disco. Bright, glittery plastic flowers poked out of holes in the white walls. The curtains were riots of color.

We waited. I was slightly nervous about our reception. Once, warlord Pacha Khan Zadran had been a U.S. ally, one of the many Afghan warlords the Americans used to help drive out the Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his minions after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But like a spoiled child, Pacha Khan had rebelled against his benefactors, apparently because no one was paying enough attention to him. First he turned against the fledg-ling Afghan government, then against his American allies. In an epic battle over a mountain pass, the Americans had just killed the warlord s son. The Pashtun code required revenge, among other things, and now, six days after the battle, here I was, a fairly convenient American, waiting like a present on a pillow in Pacha Khan s house, hoping to find a story edgy enough to make it into my newspaper not easy considering it was March 2003, and there were other things going on in

Kim Barker was the South Asia bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009, based in New Delhi and Islamabad. Her book about those years, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a dark comedic take on her time in South Asia, was published by Doubleday. The movie version, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, was released in 2016, starring Tina Fey, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, Margot Robbie and Billy Bob Thornton. Barker is now a metro reporter at The New York Times, specializing in investigative reporting and narrative writing. Before joining The Times in mid-2014, Ms. Barker was an investigative reporter at ProPublica, writing mainly about campaign finance and the fallout from the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

Remarkable. . . . [Barker] has written an account of her experiences covering Afghanistan and Pakistan that manages to be hilarious and harrowing, witty and illuminating, all at the same time. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 
  
The Taliban Shuffle isn t like any other book out there about Afghanistan and Pakistan. It s witty, brilliant, and impossible to put down. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City
 
The Taliban Shuffle is part war memoir, part tale of self-discovery that, thanks to Barker s biting honesty and wry wit, manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking. Chicago Tribune
 
What you d hear if the reporter never turned off the voice recorder between interviews brilliant firsthand outtakes that wind up telling us more about the Afghan debacle than any foreign policy briefing. The Seattle Times

At once funny and harrowing, insightful and appalling. . . . The Taliban Shuffle will pull you in so deep that you ll smell the poppies and quake from the bombs. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
If you re looking for a window on the challenges facing Afghanistan and Pakistan today from a resurgent Taliban to American incompetence to Afghan and Pakistani corruption and nepotism Barker provides a sterling vantage point. San Francisco Chronicle
 
Kim Barker gives a true and amusing picture of hellholes and the reporters on assignment in them. But she breaks the journo code of silence and reveals a trade secret of the hacks who cover hellholes: The hell of the holes is that they re kind of fun. P. J. O'Rourke 

The Taliban Shuffle gives us an insider s perspective of Afghanistan and Pakistan their fascinating cultures, unstable governments, and burgeoning terrorist groups. . . . With dark, self-deprecating humor and shrewd insight, Barker chronicles her experiences as a rookie foreign reporter and the critical years when the Taliban resurged amidst the